In 1910, Ferrara’s Jewish community obtained new land and a ten-year loan to expand and restore the cemetery of Via delle Vigne near the city walls. Ciro Contini was responsible for the design and supervising the works; he worked with the municipality, and had already designed factories, shops and memorials for the Hirsch, Ancona and Pesaro families. The imposing white granite structure is made up of two pillars on which a maghen David (star of David) is carved, and an architrave bearing the inscription “Beit moed lekol hai”, which roughly translates to “meeting house for every living person”. “The new, majestic granite entrance seems to be influenced – in the attraction for clean, straight lines, far from the sinuous curves of Art Nouveau – by the influx of Egyptian monoliths, probably ascribable to the attentive study performed by Contini in 1911 during his ‘honeymoon’ in Egypt. But the rigorously ascensional lines of the entrance evoke above all the stylistic motifs of the Vienna Secession, with Olbrich and Wagner” (Scardino 1987, p. 129).